The Mystery of Thomas Noguchi, Coroner to the Stars

‘L.A. Coroner: Thomas Noguchi and Death in Hollywood’
By Anne Soon Choi
Third State Books, 256 Pages

The chief medical examiner-coroner of Los Angeles County between 1967 and 1982, Thomas Noguchi, now approaching the age of 100, remains active and as driven as ever to maintain his public persona as coroner to the stars, having presided over the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, a suicide; the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy; the victims of the horrifying Charles Manson murders; and Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning, while also writing a memoir and mystery stories.

Anne Soon Choi depicts a Japanese immigrant drawn to America as a way to showcase his remarkable skills as a pathologist. At the same time, he has never been that removed from controversy. Monroe murder conspiracy theorists still regard him with suspicion, even though it was not his fault that all of her organs were not tested to make sure she was not injected with a lethal substance.

Mr. Noguchi ran into trouble, as well, because he was a poor administrator. His lax supervision of the coroner’s office led to several efforts to fire him — the first of which was tainted with pretty obvious prejudice against him as a “Jap,” as one of his adversaries disclosed. Not one to share fame, Mr. Noguchi was surprised at how the Japanese-American community rallied to his side during the first effort to remove him from office. 

Ms. Choi explains how sensitive the position of Japanese Americans remained in the aftermath of World War II as the ambitious Mr. Noguchi went his own way and did not kowtow to the old white man’s network of relationships that would most likely have downplayed his mistakes as coroner.

Mr. Noguchi never acknowledged how much Japanese organizations contributed to his survival in office, and they were not so enthusiastic when he again came under scrutiny for maladministration. He also supplemented his low salary with consulting jobs on the state’s time, using some of its resources. He had a simple defense: He was never not on the job, which implied he was owed overtime pay. 

Mr. Noguchi made mistakes as a coroner too, and Ms. Choi is frank about instances of lost body parts, contamination of blood samples, and the ignoring of other standard protocols, compromising the work of the coroner’s office and the police. Mr. Noguchi’s rebuttal was always the same: Mistakes were made because of underfunding that limited the resources and personnel that would fix prevalent problems. 

Sometimes Ms. Choi writes as though she is a novelist — not only setting the scene of Mr. Noguchi’s famous re-enactments of crimes for the benefit of the press, and himself, but in telling us what the coroner must have felt or thought, when, in fact, Ms. Choi does not know. Evidently, Mr. Noguchi was not helpful enough in the answers to the questions she put to him, or revelatory enough in his own memoir.

So we have such sentences as: “Noguchi must have envisioned what his future might be,” “Noguchi must have had a glimmer of hope,” “A thought must have flashed through Noguchi’s mind,” and so on in more than two-dozen instances of what might be called prurient or voyeuristic biography — an effort to penetrate what is elusive. Not only Mr. Noguchi but a jury and even a talk show host get the “must have” treatment: “[Michael] Jackson must have been thrilled to land the coroner in the middle of the ongoing controversy.”

As to why Mr. Noguchi sought so much media attention, Ms. Choi apparently does not know. His appetite for publicity just grew — like Topsy. She does not take seriously his own defense: He preferred not to keep his findings a mystery and believed public servants owed the press and the public full transparency as to methods and results, even when that sometimes meant in his haste to tell what he knew he sometimes said more than he knew, and sometimes made significant errors that a more circumspect pathologist would have avoided.

That Ms. Choi admires Mr. Noguchi’s contributions to pathology is apparent even as she enumerates his blunders and efforts to escape culpability for his malfeasance. That she is never able, however, to penetrate to the core of his personality results in so many nugatory presumptions of knowledge that do her book and biography no good. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,” “Marilyn Monroe Day by Day,” and “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag.”